The Daily Stoic - Find a Way To Use It | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

It would be nice to be a comedian, wouldn’t it? Not because it might make you rich and famous, though that would be nice. But rather, for the opportunity it would afford to turn all the things that bother you in life into material.Talk about the obstacle being the way! Comedians get to use everything that happens to them in their life, in their work. Heartbreak. Frustration. Fear. Insecurity. Confusion. It all becomes material.---In today's Ask Daily Stoic, Ryan answers questions about living on a farm, and how farm life relates to Stoicism.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more, including The Obstacle is the Way pendant.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. But on Fridays, we not only read this daily meditation, but I try to answer some questions from listeners and fellow stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy, whatever it is they happen to do. Sometimes these are from talks.

Sometimes these are people who come up to talk to me on the street. Sometimes these are written in or emailed from listeners. But I hope in answering their questions, I can answer your questions, give a little more guidance on this philosophy. We're all trying to follow. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars.

And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Find a way to use it. It'd be nice to be a comedian, wouldn't it? Not just because it might make you rich and famous, though. That would be nice. But, rather, for the opportunity, it would afford to turn all the things that bother you

in life into material. All the bad breaks could become setups. All the people who piss you off, you could turn into punchlines. As Judd Apatow writes in his wonderful book, Sikker, in the head, one of the magical things about being a comedian is when bad things happen to you, you think, I can use this in an act, and it's not purely bad. Talk about the obstacle being the way. Comedians get to use everything that happens to them in their life and their work, heartbreak,

frustration, fear, and security, confusion. It all becomes material. Yet, the Stokes would have us know that this formula is available to all of us, whatever happens, whatever we do for a living. Entrepreneurs build businesses to solve problems that they have encountered in life. Parents get to use the pain and trauma and mistakes of their own childhood to do a better job for their children. Coaches take the defeats and losses and use them to teach lessons or create motivation. It has become a cliche at this point that therapists go into

psychology and psychiatry with the hope that in helping others solve their problems, they might solve their own. Marcus Erilius writes repeatedly in meditations about how obstacles can become fuel, how like a fire we can transform everything, even the things we would have never wanted to experience. We could transform them into flame and brightness and heat, he says. In this way, we should take comfort in the fact that nothing that happens to us is purely bad. Everything has something in it that we can use to do some good, even if it's just getting on stage to make other people laugh.

Whatever it is, whatever has happened or is currently happening, we must find a way to use it to turn the fire into fuel, the obstacle into opportunity. That is our job. That's obviously what the obstacle is the way is about, which if you haven't read the book, well, I would love for you to read it. You can pick it up anywhere, books are sold. There's Audible, we've got sign copies in the Daily Stoke store. But then we also have this cool obstacle is the way Mendelian that a lot of people carry

all over the world as sort of a reminder, but leather bound edition of the book, which people really love. And then we've got a cool pendant version. You can check all of that out at store.aleystoic.com. So we've got some questions from folks about my farm, which may not seem totally stoke, but I think it is. Obviously, the stokes had a decent amount of experience with agriculture.

Cato the elder, whose Kato's great grandfather wrote one of the earliest surviving works in Latin called on agriculture. We've talked about in Daily Stoke messages before. Seneca owned farms. He talks about managing his estates. The famous Roman hero since Sanatus, I returned to his farm after saving Rome from invaders. So I

happened to spend most of my time on a little hobby farm or homestead outside Austin, Texas. And so some people have some sort of questions about it. So I thought I'd riff on that a little bit. Someone asked, sort of, why did I move to a farm? Well, why did I get the farm? Well, part of it was my wife, my wife loves animals. It was always her dream, and it seemed exciting and interesting to me. And so she started as a woofer, so she did,

she volunteered on a couple of farms, realized she liked it. We ended up getting one outside Austin. I remember the first time I visited it, it was just, there was space, there was quiet, there was something to look out at. Peter Teal is talk to races like you should invest in things that don't have diminishing returns

and he said, a great view is one of them. You know, I look out my back window and out over the window that I do my writing on and I see a lake and I see the cows and I see ducks landing in the lake and I see the sun that I do my writing on and I see a lake and I see the cows and I see ducks landing in the lake and I see the sun coming up over the trees. You know, it's just it's beautiful and reassuring and I get I get some peace and stillness out of that and it's been really valuable and important to me. So we picked this out a few years ago. There's some wonderful tax implications

in Texas. If you use land for an agricultural purpose, so there's some benefits for that. Really, we just wanted space. We wanted quiet. We wanted some, you know, we just wanted something different. I'm a big believer in living an interesting life, doing interesting things. And I've certainly learned a lot from the farm,

which actually is the next question. I was like, what have you learned having a farm? I mean, one of the things you learn is you just learn how prevalent death is. Like, it's just things are dying all the time. You've got to shoot things, whether they're, you know, a fox getting into your chicken coop or a snake getting into your chicken coop, which I just had to do a few days ago. You know, it's a cow that's sick. You know, it just, it really introduces you to the reality of life, right? And I think that's one of the benefits of having the farm. It's created a more natural existence in the sense that I don't live in this sort of fantasy city world

of a tall skyscraper with everything delivered and everything on demand. It's kind of forced some self-reliance. And so what's interesting about this sort of pandemic quarantine is it's like, it's actually, oh, wait, this is like maybe a more natural way to live anyway. This hasn't actually changed my day-to-day existence this much. In fact, I'm kind of enjoying actually getting to experience the thing I was spending so much time away from.

And I think, you know, you learn a lot of practical things. You learn how to, you know, string barbed wire. You learn how to shoot a gun. You learn how to take care of a sick animal. You learn how to do a lot of stuff. There's a lot to do. You know, epic tea that he says like, he quotes Socrates. He says, you know, some people are Epic Titus, he says like, he quotes Socrates, he says, you know, some people

are excited about improving their farm. He says, I work on improving myself. But the interesting thing about having a farm is that it's forced me to improve myself. It's made me a little scrappier, it made me more handy. It's made me like learn things. It's made me get outside. I've just learned things about myself. And, you know, I I've also found from a stillness perspective, having all this stuff to do that's not work, like not my job job, it's not recording these podcasts or writing books or going to meetings or flying to do a talk.

It's kept me centered in a really great way. And it's kept me busy. It's like in a church, oh, had his painting kept me busy. It's like, you know, Churchill had his painting. He also had some property outside London at Chartwell, which I've gone to visit it. I've gone to visit recently, you know. He loved to go out and feed his goldfish and feed his swans. There's just something in that that's really special,

and I've just, I've gotten a lot out of that. So the experience of having the farm has been educational, it's been centering, and then someone asked, you know, anything interesting recently happened on the farm. I was mentioning how, you know, there's a lot of death. Well, we lost two cows in the last week, which was not fun. One of the cows is very old, push in 20. Yeah, there's more 16 or 17. We bought all these cows from the person we bought the land from. So, you know, we don't really know how they were taken care of before that they were old. And we took care of this cow. Our name was Brownie. We brought her water

and hay. We tried to get her some medicine. We checked on a vet. But unfortunately, she died. And, you know, we went out to check on her and, okay, I had to bring my son, because my other son was napping. And so we took him and he has to see the dead cow. And then that's a discussion. But then I had to do something about this dead cow. Unfortunately, you can't leave a 1,500 pound animal there, not only will it smell disgusting,

but it'll attract predators, which could potentially endanger the other animal. So I don't have a tractor, so I had to figure out a way. At a neighbor come over, we had to loop this thick strap around its neck, and I had to drag it with my UTV, which is like an ATV with a cage and doors and stuff, and I had to drag it about three quarters of a mile, maybe more. Like, you know, you're just driving, dragging a 1,500 pound dead cow, who used to be your pet, who you loved, who you're saddest gone, and you're just dragging around.

It was a gruesome, strange sight. And so Rigomortus had come in, and it already puffed up a little bit. And, you know, I had a dragon, and let me tell you, the other cows were not happy to see this. They got mad. There's a whole thing about getting it through the gate, and then you sort of drag it back down by a creek

where you have a little fenced off area that the cows don't go and we drop it. And that's, again, the circle of life. The buzzards will handle it. The, you know, the coyotes will come, the ants will come, the bugs will take care of it. I didn't do it this time, but sometimes actually what you want to do if you want to increase, it speed up the decom process.

I may still have to do this. You have to, with an axe or a knife, you have to cut a big hole on the side of it. Otherwise, the vultures wait until basically the gases make the animal explode. So you can cut it open or you can shoot it with a shotgun or something, throw a bowl of hole in it. That allows them to get in and speeds up the Decom process. But it's humbling, right? So this idea of memento-mori, like you die,

and then pretty soon you're just a corpse that's getting dragged around by a chain and you're a food for buzzards. You know what Mark really Serelia talks about, he's like, look, Alexander the great was buried in the same ground as Mule Driver. I'm gonna be buried in the same ground as this cow. Same disgusting process is gonna happen to me.

My corpse is gonna be lugged around. Like, that's what life is, right? And so, you know, having a farm kind of reminds you of this stuff. And it's humbling and it's sobering. It's also a lot of fun and it's interesting and you'll learn a lot. And actually, if you're interested in learning a little bit more about this stuff, I've written about it. I have a medium piece, I know, in a farm. I have a piece on why I live to Texas, why I moved to Texas. But a couple years ago, we interviewed this guy named Scott Herbert.

He has a podcast called the Stoic Medal, M-E-T-T-L-E. But he talked about how he moved to a farm in 2016, and he's got a podcast about running it, which is interesting. But anyways, he talks about how Stoicism brought him to farming. And he was lost in life. He said he was experiencing what Robert Green calls dead time. You know, go to work and live for the weekends. And he just, he heard a call to farming. And now that's what he's doing.

And I respect people who take gambles and take risks. And he said he's found that the stoic virtues of courage, injustice, and self-control and wisdom have helped him manage this difficult situation. And so I think that's the idea for me with the farm is like, how can I apply these stoic teachings to a real situation in the real world. And, you know, I think having the farm connects you with nature, right? The stoics talk about living in the cordons with

nature. You know, Seneca talks about taking wandering outdoor walks, being nourished by the open air and breathing. Well, that's what farming has done for me. That's what's created some stillness in my life. It's also been challenging. It's also forced me to grow And so yeah, it's it's fun. It's interesting. It's not for everyone certainly if you want to sort of see how crazy It can be you can follow me on Instagram, but yeah, check it out and if I had a couple other books. I would definitely recommend I definitely recommend Robert Graves Uh, no, sorry. I definitely recommend Robert Graves. No, sorry, I definitely recommend John Graves. He has a book called Hard Scrabble,

which I really enjoyed. And another one called Notes from a Lime Stone Ledge. And he just talks about sort of philosophy and his life sort of running this small little farm in Texas. He's also a brilliant writer. So he was sort of doing the same thing I am. But yeah, those are some recommendations, and thanks for listening,

thanks for helping make my farm possible. Certainly, the farm does not make any money. It is the writing income that subsidizes the farm, not the other way around, but it's a good life, it's honest, and it's fun and challenging, and I think, yeah, it's been really good for me. So thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Just a reminder we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoke store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend, the app goes the way, you go as the enemy, in this is the key, the leather bound addition of the daily stoke. We have them all in the daily stoke store, which you can check out at store Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

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We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So, if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.